About AzPHP

The Arizona PHP User's Group meets on the 4th Tuesday of every month. We provide an informal atmosphere to share PHP news and information. We follow it up with a social hour to follow up on topics from the meeting as well as network with fellow geeks.

1. streams: 2 tools, export gzip of a directory, and import the resulting archive to a new folder 2. redis: content caching? 3. redis (advanced): pub-sub 4. mysql: whatever you want… simple 5. console: make a script which asks for your name, then does something with it. 6. oauth: twitter client? 7. crypto: do passwords “right” 8. time zones: make a simple time-zone-based time converter or clock 9. event (advanced): use ev extension to do something asynchronous like have a console command that just counts until another script signals it. 10. images: make an avatar image using a selected color (hex) and your initials centered in the box. 11. apis: make a script which will find a location (lat/lon) for an address 12. apis: make a script which will translate a phrase from english to ? 13. ai: make a bot capable of passing the turing test 14. apis: make an api service to allow a user to query for some sort of data 15. lua: utilize the lua extension to do something 16. composer: use composer to set up a project using libraries able to send mail, use an ORM, and log events 17. logging: make a script which will log events to syslog, using a psr-3 interface 18. testing: write unit tests using phpunit to test a math-y class 19. testing: use prophecy to mock a database class so it does not hit a database when your test runs 20. sessions: write a session-handler class to store session data in redis 21. templating: use twig to write a simple webpage which includes dynamic data 22. regex: write a script which will take the contents of a webpage and output a list of all the images on the page, optionally add the size of each image WITHOUT actually downloading the image. 23. time: write a fuzzy-time renderer to take a date-time and render something wordy like “3 days from now”, “next week”, “long, long ago…” 24. unicode: write an emoji class to convert specific strings like “(y)” to a thumbs-up. Extra points if you use the pile-of-poo unicode. 25. write or use a markdown library to render a markdown file in the cli 26. testing: use behat to write a few behavior-driven tests 27. documentation: use a documenting library to export documentation for some random php library or set of classes. 28. search: index some data using elasticsearch (for easy data, use the faker library) 29. visualization: write a script to render a data-series as a line or bar chart

Elijah did a great job presenting the basics on using PDO and how it can help you secure your code last Tuesday.
Next month I’ll be demoing how to set up your (local) development environment to use XDebug for debugging code within your IDE. I’ll use PHPStorm, but it can be done about the same with PHPEclipse.

OpenShift, a PAAS run by Redhat, will be presenting at this month’s meeting.

Mobilize Your MongoDB! Developing iPhone and Android Apps in the Cloud: This is a technical how-to session on how to develop iPhone and Android apps with PHP + MongoDB backends for the cloud. Grant will feature an app he wrote called Beershift and take you through the mobile development process.

If you’re interested in NoSQL databases or web services for mobile applications, this sound like it’ll be good for you.

If you haven’t been paying attention, the newest thing in icons is font-icons. That means creating vector-based images, putting them in a font, then assigning css classes to specific characters (icons) in the font. It’s smooth, scalable, fast, and works on recent versions of all modern browsers. There are already a few editors out there which you can use to create them, or just look on github for “fontello” to generate one.